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pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"

While I agree, I think they know of these issues. They will probably store many of the files used to generate vital and productivity pages locally. You can save offline maybe and it will auto sync the next time you have access? Who knows... I do not, but to assume they are that shortsighted is not giving them nearly enough credit.

Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access. So how would I perform my work with such a paradigm?

The mozilla team has already talked about Firefox 3's upcoming support for running online apps while offline, as a sort of hybrid, but still within the browser. Just do a search for "web applications offline' and you'll find dozens of articles including how-to sites from tool providers for making Web apps that will function offline right now.

To user the desktop metaphor is not dead when offline.

I'm not sold on Web applications. I'm not sold on a strategy of bypassing MS by building everything on top of them. I'd rather see cross platform applications with internet capabilities, or hybrid solutions, that still allow me to take advantage of the benefits of the OS. From a practical standpoint, however, my automatic bibliography formatting service allows me to automatically format bibliography references right now using Google Docs, but I can't use the same functionality in Wordpad or in MSWord for that matter; so in some ways online apps are already allowing me to bypass the limitations of Microsoft's OS.

Not at all. It just introduces a synchronization step when you go back online. Windows does this already with its file servers - if you go offline and have some shared files open, you can still use them normally, save them, etc. But when you go online, the files get synchronized back to the server so they can be backed up, opened from other workstations, etc. It's supposed to be the best of both worlds.